Rusthon – A Pythonic language that compiles to Rust and C++

https://github.com/rusthon/Rusthon

by doublextremevil • 12 years ago

139 31 12 years ago

github.com

sdfjkl• 12 years ago

Reminds me of Nim (formerly Nimrod): http://nim-lang.org/

def-• 12 years ago

Nim was also in the benchmark on the frontpage yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8778041

haberman• 12 years ago

Compiling to Rust is a really interesting proposition, because it means the resulting program has the same safe-without-gc properties as native Rust programs.

quotemstr2• 12 years ago

Unless it transmutes pointers and uses unsafe blocks, of course. One of Rust's most important features is that you can do things like that. Hell, the stdlib even has longjmp.

tomjakubowski• 12 years ago

Really? Where's the longjmp function?

alkonaut• 12 years ago

Surely it just does that, otherwise it would be dropping all the cognitive overhead of lifetime management that we pay (happily) in Rust, without losing safety? If that was possible you'd think it was already in the Rust specs...

jumanji• 12 years ago

https://github.com/rusthon/Rusthon/blob/master/pythonjs/tran...

if '--cpp' [...] rust=True

Is that a bug?

broodbucket• 12 years ago

https://github.com/rusthon/Rusthon/blob/master/pythonjs/pyth...

Doesn't look like there's C++ flag in python_to_pythonjs, so I'd guess not.

amit_m• 12 years ago

Cython already compiles to C and is relatively mature.

In my opinion these hacks will always be specialty tools. What the world really needs is more languages that are both expressive and run pretty fast. e.g. Julia.

shadowmint3• 12 years ago

Cython isn't the answer.

It's a neat tool, for sure, but it's a very specific thing, and it has several down sides, mainly:

- Every module compiles to a shared library.

- Requires significant c infrastructure installed on the target machine to compile.

- Compiled code cannot be used without the python runtime.

This renders it almost useless for generating code for serious applications. It's an adhoc solution to ffi and slowness because those are things are major issues for python.

However, this (Rusthon) has some serious upsides:

The transpiled (if that's the word?) C++ / rust code is portable and fast.

It does not include the bloated standard python library.

It can be directly compiled using existing compiler tools for mobile devices (to be fair, as the kivy-ios project shows, this isn't impossible with cython, but it involves patching the python source to load modules differently).

andreasvc4• 12 years ago

- Every module compiles to a shared library.

How else would you import a module if it wasn't? If you want to reduce the number of shared libraries you could put all your code in a single module, of course.

- Requires significant c infrastructure installed on the target machine to compile.

Anything which involves compilation to native code requires significant infrastructure.

- Compiled code cannot be used without the python runtime.

And this is a downside why? Combining the best of both worlds--native code and Python--is the whole point. If you want to take out Python from the equation just use C/C++.

andreasvc4• 12 years ago

The trade-offs between a single JITed language versus having a scripting and native language are interesting. I think there are a few advantages to the latter approach though. JIT is never going to beat carefully hand-optimized code, and the amount of code that needs such optimization is small. Furthermore the performance of JIT is not necessarily predictable, and comes with additional memory usage. Finally languages such as Python, R, or Matlab have a vast ecosystem of libraries; this gives a big incentive to keep on interoperating with them instead of switching to a new language.

BuckRogers4• 12 years ago

It is interesting and the combo of native compiled and interpreted is IMO preferable over single JIT.

The good news is that Python itself offers JIT though PyPy, and now Rusthon offers the former.

I prefer Rusthon (or the idea of Rusthon if it works out well) over all else for the future. But with standard Python (meaning 2.x) code carried forward primarily with PyPy at the same time.

duey• 12 years ago

Why would you use this over LLVM? e.g. pyston (LLVM Python) and then using llc -march=rustc/c/cpp/whatever to convert?

rattray• 12 years ago

Pyston is a very exciting project. The commit velocity on github seems quite high [0]. Here's the latest status update on their blog, for those interested: http://blog.pyston.org/2014/11/21/pyston-status-update/

[0] https://github.com/dropbox/pyston/graphs/commit-activity

techdragon• 12 years ago

Except it's not targeting Python 3

Pypy is pushing towards full 3.4 slowly, which is good because I want some of that Juicy STM support in my web apps.

yazaddaruvala• 12 years ago

The biggest reason would be the "native" interoperability. No FFIs because while you could call it a language it's more accurately syntax sugar.

Another reason with Rust at least. Rusthon can make the same memory guarantees as Rust.

Personally I wish this was done with Ruby.. But then again I'm not writing it myself, so I can't really complain.

A random last thought, it would be really something if Rust could formally prove its memory safety and then push that whole system of lifetimes and borrow checks into LLVM or a similar abstraction on top of LLVM. Because Rust as a compiler target is very interesting but it wasn't really built for that.

Demiurge• 12 years ago

As I'm sure everyone, I was wondering, why... If you follow through from the top to the blog, there is authors reasoning:

Introducing Rusthon

Rust is a systems programming language, and too low level for quick prototyping, or simple web backends. It is nice to have all of the low level control so you can fine tune performance later, but it should be optional. Rusthon is a high level Python-like language that compiles to Rust. Rusthon started as a fork of Gython, which is a fork of PythonJS.

The goal of Rusthon is simple and clean syntax inspired by Python. Rusthon will allow you to code at a higher level than normal Rust code, and interoperate well with hand written Rust and the Rust libraries. You can start off writting your application in Rusthon, and drop down to hand written Rust where you need more performance.

http://rusthon-lang.blogspot.com/

lago• 12 years ago

  # naming fix :)
  mv Rusthon Pythrust

chenzhekl• 12 years ago

It would be great if it can interoperate seamlessly with existed C++ library.

Matthias247• 12 years ago

Does this care about memory at all? In the transpiled code I see structures getting allocated but never deallocated.

That will work for this trivial examples, but not for anything serious.

To properly translate Python to C++ you would have atleast produce a shared_ptr<T> from every T and even that doesn't work with cycles. Rust translation is even more complicated.

agentultra• 12 years ago

It also doesn't even appear to generator initializer lists for the constructor which could lead to some fun behaviors down the road...

andywood• 12 years ago

Some comments here suggest the possibility of making manual changes to the Rust code. After cross compiling, how does one make changes to the Rust code, then go back and make changes to the Python code, and cross compile again without losing the customized Rust code?

Rusthon – A Pythonic language that compiles to Rust and C++

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